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On Call The top of the working week brings with it magical possibilities for fun and frolics, which is why The Register celebrates each Friday with a unusual incantation of On Call – the reader-contributed column that tells your tech enhance tales.
This week, meet a reader we will Regomize as “Rohan” who told us of an incident from the late Nineties when a buddy operated a bulletin board on a machine that ran IBM’s OS/2 Warp operating system.
That box was crashing constantly, so Rohan’s buddy asked if he may perhaps fix it.
Rohan visited his buddy’s home and sat down in front of the OS/2 box. He watched it boot, load several programs, then crash. Then boot, then load programs, then crash.
The cycle looked appreciate it may perhaps repeat till the heat death of the universe.
Rohan quickly found out why. “The default behavior for OS/2 was to reboot and then restart any programs that were running at the time of the reboot/crash,” he told On Call. So the BBS box was behaving as meant, and Rohan may perhaps not pick out how to fix it.
But he knew a bloke – let’s call him Jim – who was an OS/2 guru and prepared to assist.
“After seeing the boot loop, Jim sat in a chair and thought about it,” Rohan recalled.
“And then – and I will never forget this – he sat in the chair, put his head in his hands, began to rub his temples as if summoning a higher power of OS/2 knowledge, and slowly began to speak.”
- Crack coder wasn’t allowed to meet shoppers due to his assorted talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults
- Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its bear weighty way
- To patch this server, we’d like to win someone inebriated
- A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and acquired things working again
In that strange techno-trance, Jim uttered the following:
Rohan did as he was told, saved the CONFIG.SYS file, and rebooted the OS/2 box.
“Like magic, the evil boot loop was broken, the system was usable, and we were able to correct the issue causing the crash and boot loop,” Rohan wrote. And when Rohan returned home that evening, he immediately modified the CONFIG.SYS on his system to avoid a similar doom loop. “I did not pass go nor collect $200. I modified my CONFIG.SYS,” Rohan told On Call.
“To watch a man sit in a chair, rub his temples, and slowly emit the words as he did was like watching witchcraft,” Rohan told On Call. “It was unforgettable.”
Have you seen a techie in a trance? Or a sysadmin cast a spell? Share your magical tale by clicking here to ship On Call an email so we can have in mind your mysterious message for a future Friday. ®
